My GPS Camera Phone

On this day in 2007, this blog found it’s way out of my head and onto the Internet. Originally, I thought a big post recalling all the good times and new friends would be in order, but instead I decided to show you my favorite camera phone photo from each of the last 12 months. So sit back and enjoy. Feel free to walk down memory lane by checking out the photo archives yourself.

Many thanks to everyone who kept me going. Here’s to another year!

September 2007:

October 2007:

November 2007:

December 2007:

January 2008:

February 2008:

March 2008:

April 2008:

May 2008:

June 2008:

July 2008:

August 2008:

Thanks to the awesomeness that is Dan, I now have a functioning blog again. Here’s the scoop:

If you have any problems with uploading images in WordPress 2.6, visit this link. It’s an incredibly detailed account of what could go wrong with the Flash uploader and how to fix it. My solution was to download the patched functions.php file and replace it with the one on my server. No more problem.

The WordPress folks say that the fixed uploader will be included in the 2.6.1 release.

As for Sepia Week, it’s on! I’ll get caught up later tonight.

Something strange is happening and I don’t know why.

I installed Wordpress 2.6 on another domain hosted on the same account as this blog. I was able to upload images via the new image uploader in 2.6, but suddenly I get an error message that says “Failed to write to disk.” The image doesn’t upload.

I set the folders to read/write/execute and still nothing. I tried a few image plugins and nothing. So I post the other blog with no image. No big deal.

I come over here to post the next two days of Sepia Week and now I can’t upload images for My GPS Camera Phone. To say it’s frustrating would be an understatement.

If anyone has any clue as to what’s going on here, I’d really appreciate some advice. I think it’s something on the server that may have gotten rewritten when the new blog was added, but I’m not good with the back end stuff. Until I get this fixed, Sepia Week is on hold, as well as any other post. I’ll continue posting on  the new blog – BRAINdisTRUST – but without pictures. Stop by and say hello.

At long last, I have finally gone and started another blog. As much as I love this blog, I have to say that the topic confines me to 1) photography and 2) camera phones, which isn’t a bad thing, but it prevents me from being my normal smarmy self.

BRAINdisTRUST was born from the “un.cropped” Tumblr blog I was erratically posting to. The feed for that blog was pulled into this blog on its own page, but it has since been removed. Now I can stay focused on the niche of camera phone photography here and get my all-other-topics fix over there. A rather nice arrangement.

What you will find on BRAINdisTRUST:

• social commentary
• creative stuff like design, fonts, Photoshop brushes, etc…
• photography of the non-camera phone type
• parenting experiences
• videos that amuse me
• tech stuff, be it software, hardware or a web service
• quotes from the web
• spam poetry
• all things stupid (think “Darwin Awards”)
• whatever else strikes me as blog-worthy

What’s with the name? So glad you asked! I’m a word geek and adding “dis” to the term “brain trust” seemed amusing. See I told you – word geek. It’s like a double-entendre.*

Here’s the good part. If you go visit my new blog and subscribe to the RSS feed, I will think very highly of you and tell all of my friends how cool you are. Seriously. I might even throw in a link to my inaugural visitors because everyone loves them some link love. I know I do.

Eventually, I’ll add an Entrecard widget and maybe some other stuff, but for now it’s a pretty basic blog. More things to come in the future, guaranteed. And don’t worry, this blog will keep on truckin’ like always.

Now go visit the BRAINdisTRUST!

*Note: It’s not really, I just wanted to use “double entendre” in a post. Remember? Word geek?

Thanks to Dan’s blog review by Michael Kwan at Beyond the Rhetoric, I’ve picked up some tips on cleaning out the dead wood. Nothing major, but little things that make a difference.

First off, I’ve moved the RSS feed subscription links to the sidebar and added an e-mail option. I subscribed myself and must say that the e-mail is surprisingly clean and pleasant to look at. So if RSS readers aren’t your thing, then try subscribing via e-mail. I’ve also added a comment feed if you want to keep track of the current conversations.

The next thing up is fixing some annoying IE bugs. Being a Mac and Camino/Firefox guy, sometimes I don’t think about checking the site in IE (mainly because I’d have to get up every minute to check the site on my Windows machine in the other room). Thankfully, Chica hooked me up and told me what was wrong when she viewed it in IE. So if you see any weirdness over the weekend, it’s just me trying to find the right CSS hack to fix the problem. The navigation is apparently off as well in IE, so that will be fixed, too.

After that, I’ll look at the right side of the header and see if it’s worth putting up something or just leaving it as-is. It seems empty with just text. I thought about a well-blended ad, but I don’t want to make it look bad. As for ads in general, I’ll be reassessing ad placement in an attempt to get some more click-throughs. Same goes for affiliates. I also may look at different methods of monetization that may better fit my audience.

If you want a good review of your blog, maybe it’s worth the money to have Michael do one for you. I learned a lot from Dan’s review and I can only imagine how much I could learn from a review of my own. Thanks, Dan, for footing the bill this time around.

Update: It looks like I managed to fix everything, but I’d sincerely appreciate it if you would report any weirdness in the site layout. IE users shouldn’t have anymore rendering issues with the navigation and the content background. On top of that, I also updated the site search with the newer Google Custom Search, which seems a lot more smoother. Suggestions? Let me know via the contact form. Thanks!

Ah, the smell of a new blog design.

In an attempt to package many ideas that have been brewing, I decided to go with Mimbo, a theme recommended to me by Opal about two months ago. It’s a magazine-style layout that offers up a lot of space for blog content in an easy-to-absorb format. The theme itself is insanely customizable, but hardly a simple undertaking, especially if you are afraid to dig into the code. I’m particularly fond of the latest post box and the category-based sections. While there are a few quirks with this theme, it is an incredible piece of work.

Being faced with a nice vacation, I decided now was the time. So after spending way too much time in front of the screen, here’s the nearly finished product.

Things to note:

• The “your gps camera phone” category is exactly that – a new section for guest blogging where you get to submit your photos and stories in return for a super-deluxe link back to your site. This should be rolled out in the next day or so. Stay tuned.
• I’ll be geo-tagging some (not all) photos in Google Earth and then posting the .KML/.KMZ file for you to download. It’s primarily going to be a log of all the user-submitted photos and some of my photos from around the area. This is also coming soon, hopefully in the next two or so days.
• Tutorials – they are coming. I’ll probably host them on Revver or somewhere and then embed them in the site to save bandwidth, but I’m not so sure yet. Anyone have experience with hosted video sites?
• The blogroll is on a separate page now, so if you see a link from my site drop off due to the theme switch, it should re-appear soon.
• The top commenter widget is no more, unless I can find a place to put it. Sorry, Joe.

If there’s more, I’ll be sure to let you know. Thanks to everyone for visiting and providing plentiful, sensible comments. It’s been fun so far, but the next year is going to be a blast. And you’re going to be a part of it.

Image credit: Geotrac, via Dreamstime.com.